Daunting prospect

Grazing sheep help keep down the cost of maintaining Britain's national parks. But cuts to farmers' subsidies mean flocks are shrinking, forcing a rethink on the management of our landscapes. By Madeleine Bunting

Daunting prospect

Grazing sheep help keep down the cost of maintaining Britain's national parks. But cuts to farmers' subsidies mean flocks are shrinking, forcing a rethink on the management of our landscapes. By Madeleine Bunting

From Reg Peirson's stone-built farmhouse, the view is stunning in the crisp English sunshine. The fields that cloak the valley are an even, velvety green and the upland that sweeps around the dale is the dark maroon of a heather moor.

This combination of broad expanse and the farming domesticity of the green valleys that cut deep into the North York Moors is part of what attracts almost 10 million visitors to the national park here every year. But as Peirson scatters feed for the ewes and new lambs in the field, the seeming stability of this timeless scene is deceptive.

While the tourists flock to the nearby village of Goathland to see the setting for the TV series Heartbeat, huge questions now hang over the future of the sheep-grazed moorland through which they drive. Peirson's sheep grazing in the village are the backdrop for thousands of tourist snaps, but the question is for how much longer. The grazing is poor because of lack of rain, so the feed he has to provide is eating into the narrowest of profit margins. In the autumn markets, he will be lucky to clear £20 on each lamb. It's an income of around £14,000 a year for a 70-hour week.

Peirson's plight is the biggest headache that Andy Wilson, chief executive of the North York Moors national park, has to worry about. The rate of decline of moorland flocks there is currently running at 3.5 flocks a year and this is expected to accelerate rapidly. There may be fewer than 30 flocks left within four years.

What's true of this national park is true of many others where the dominant characteristic is sheep-grazed moorland: the Yorkshire Dales, the Peak District, the Lakes, Exmoor, Dartmoor. Over nearly 1,000 years, these distinctive habitats have evolved as sheep "manage" the moorland with minimal human intervention. The moors also provide habitat for grouse, which are far more profitable.

National treasure

Britain accounts for three-quarters of the world's moorland habitats, which represent a remarkable national treasure. But the National Trust (NT), which looks after more than 150,000 hectares (about 370,000 acres) of land in upland areas, has warned that hill farming is "on the brink of a rapid and unmanaged collapse". Peter Nixon, head of conservation for the NT, says the economics of sheep farming have been propped up by subsidy for more than 50 years. Now, as the reform of the common agricultural policy begins to bite, sheep farmers' level of subsidy will drop by 50% in the coming years.

"Our number one concern is how do you keep rural Britain economically viable," says Kathy Moore, of the Council for National Parks (CNP). "With the reform of agricultural subsidies, what kind of land management will we have in the future?"

The parks were the brainchild of the 1945 Labour government, after a generation of lobbying and false starts. They were set up with a dual purpose of conservation of wildlife and cultural heritage and the promotion of access so that people understand and enjoy the special characteristics of these precious landscapes. The question now is how parks with large upland areas are going to interpret these twin purposes for the future.

Does conservation mean the moors must remain as they are? If so, what kind of subsidies will be necessary to keep loss-sustaining sheep farming on the moors? Or could conservation of wildlife mean more radical options of letting the sheep leave and allowing the moors to return to the scrub and, eventually, to the forests that they were thousands of years ago?

Parks officials are only too aware of the enormous public pressure to keep the beloved landscapes exactly as they are. Over the past few decades, that has increasingly meant an intensive form of management - there is nothing "natural" about the landscape of a moorland. For example, bracken has to be sprayed from helicopters to keep back its inexorable spread - 3% increase in land coverage in England every year - and the heather has to be burnt periodically to prevent a build-up of dead wood, which is a fire risk.

"When people come to the moors, they want to see purple heather in August and they want the fields and well-kept walls," says Wilson, adding that the idea of turning it over to scrub would remove precisely those wide horizons that the tourists pour out of the cities to enjoy.

John Darlington, area manager for the NT's holdings in the Lake District, agrees, but he believes that it is not possible to be "Canute-like" and say the landscape will stay exactly the same. "The future of farming has to engage a much wider public," he argues. "There has to be a debate about what we want these landscapes to look like. We are at a crucial point of change and we all have to make the decisions."

The issues are not just about aesthetics, he adds. "Seventy per cent of our water originates in upland areas, so the managers of that landscape are crucial to water quality. Plus, the peat is the biggest carbon sink in the UK."

All these pressures were starkly evident at the sustainable development forum held by the North York Moors national park earlier this month, attended by representatives of the diverse interests for which the park has to cater - from the tourism industry to the farming community. Everyone had their own vision of what the park should be doing to secure the area's future.

In England, park authorities have to listen carefully to such diverse interests because much of the land for which they are responsible is privately owned. Unlike national parks in other parts of the world, such as in the US or New Zealand, English parks are not pristine wilderness but areas of human habitation and economic activity. That has always resulted in tensions between conservation and economic sustainability.

But some radical ecologists believe that the national parks are too pragmatic and cautious and are not asking the big questions. Paul Evans, an ecologist writer and broadcaster, says: "Large areas of land are not working at the moment, so why not re-wild them? How about eco-system restoration? Bring in beavers to create wetlands, and large herbivores such as roe deer and feral ponies to maintain the eco-balance."

Dramatic challenge

The model that inspires such critics is Oostvaardersplassen in the Netherlands, where a park has been created in which humans have withdrawn from a large area of reclaimed land. But Evans doesn't underestimate the dramatic challenge that such a shift in approach would represent. "Conservation is an ideology of pragmatism and involves negotiating between different human interest groups," he says. "Eco-restoration is anathema to people who have been fighting the wild for generations."

What Evans objects to is how national parks are regarded as a "resource" that must "pay their way". His most radical challenge is to ask why parks should facilitate access, and why shouldn't some areas return to being inaccessible? "What worries me about national parks is that their thinking seems to have pickled," he says. "They've got caught up in adopting pragmatism as an ideology. We should be thinking about a bigger picture of setting aside areas to work with ecological processes, rather than corner them into a managed resource."

Peter Taylor, author of Beyond Conservation, takes a similar line and argues that national parks should let 10%-25% of their land go wild. A "quiet economy" based on eco-tourism would have a few farmers in a custodial role, and Taylor advocates reintroducing wild ponies and cattle.

This kind of thinking is a far cry from the views that hold sway in Whitehall. In recent years, the CNP has tried to convince the Treasury of the astonishing value for money represented by the nine national parks. Moore argues that the £43m they receive annually - roughly equivalent to the cost of maintaining London's royal parks - is a bargain, with the Peak District alone accounting for 22m visitor days a year.

Moore is struggling to get politicians to grasp that the value of the parks goes beyond the tourism benefits and touches many department agendas - from health to education and the increasing interest in a politics of wellbeing. Yet the narrow agenda of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs rarely puts these wider benefits in the equation.

The task of explaining them to millions of visitors is just as hard. Should there be a congestion charge to enter national parks, for example? How does one begin to get visitors to understand that the landscapes they so enjoy no longer generate a viable income for those whose labour produces them?